


Blue Hat

by Caro_the_Poet



Category: Gilmore Girls
Genre: Angst and Tragedy, F/M, Post-Season/Series 07
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:41:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28152519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caro_the_Poet/pseuds/Caro_the_Poet
Summary: Another life. Perhaps it was another life. I forgot for a moment that I don’t technically exist anymore. I’m just a ghost, attached to a house, to the people in the house, without knowing why or for how long. My thoughts race with desperation. I should do something, but there is nothing I can do.
Relationships: Luke Danes/Lorelai Gilmore
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	Blue Hat

**Author's Note:**

> I got the idea for this from a Tumblr prompt: Person A is a ghost who can’t remember anything about their life. All they know is that they feel oddly compelled to follow around this very sad person who’s always crying and hugging old t-shirts at night. What they don’t know is that this person was their spouse.  
> Don't ask me why I like writing tragedy so much. I have no control over the muse.

_Now that I’ve worn out, I’ve worn out the world_  
_I’m on my knees in fascination_  
_Looking through the night_  
_And the moon’s never seen me before_  
_But I’m reflecting light._

_Who am I? Why am I here?_

I’m standing in the corner of a dark room, somebody’s bedroom. A gauzy black dress hangs haphazardly over the side of the queen-size bed, one filmy sleeve dragging on the floor. Shards of sunlight cut through the cracks in the miniblinds, but grief hangs in the air like an impenetrable fog. 

_The moon’s never seen me before_  
_But I’m reflecting light_

The song ends, but a woman, huddled up on the bed and holding a blue-plaid flannel shirt in a white-knuckled grip, crawls unsteadily to her feet and walks across the room to where a CD player squats on the shiny bureau. She presses the Repeat button. _Now that I’ve worn out, I’ve worn out the world…_

Who is she? I should know. I _know_ I should know. But my mind is blank. I feel an unsettling combination of disorientation and familiarity, as if I have been here before, in another life.

Another life. Perhaps it was another life. I forgot for a moment that I don’t technically exist anymore. I’m just a ghost, attached to a house, to the people in the house, without knowing why or for how long. My thoughts race with desperation. I should do something, but there is nothing I can do. 

The woman reaches up and impatiently pushes wavy brown hair out of her eyes, long strands sticking to the teary damp on her cheeks. I can see her face. It’s vaguely familiar, but I can’t place it. Something is off about her eyes. So strikingly blue, but so empty. _They should be brimming with wit and sparkle and laughter_ , I think. I don’t know how I know any of this. 

_I rode the pain down, got off and looked up_  
_Looked into your eyes_

“Oh,” the woman moans brokenly, sinking to the floor in a sobbing heap of long brown hair, pink nightgown, and blue-plaid flannel. 

I hear bare feet pounding the hallway outside, and the bedroom door flings open. 

“Mom!”

A younger woman with matching brown hair and blue eyes barrels into the room and falls to her knees beside her mother. She gathers the weeping bundle in her arms for a moment, and then cocks her head as the soft music registers in her ears. She sets her jaw and stands, angrily jabbing and Stop button on the CD player. Sinking back down on the floor, she runs her fingers through her mother’s hair and whispers, “Mom, you have to stop. You have to stop listening to that song.” 

The woman sits up wearily and covers her face with her hands for a moment. “I can’t, Rory. I can’t. As long as it’s playing I can pretend the last two weeks didn’t happen. I can see Luke rolling his eyes and ranting at me that time I bought him a suit and made him try it on, I can see him smiling at me the first time we danced at Liz and TJ’s wedding, I feel the first time he kissed me at the inn, I can hear him yelling at Taylor at the town meeting when Taylor tried to get everyone to vote on whether or not we should be allowed to date, I can see everything, and then the music stops and all I can see is his cold, empty face at the hospital; and oh, Rory, _I can’t find his blue hat!_ ” Her voice breaks on the last words and sobs wrack her body. 

Rory pulls her mother’s head against her chest and strokes her hair. “We’ll find it, Mom. I promise.”

“You can’t promise me that!” The woman raises her head and I can see the panic rising in her eyes. “What if Paul Anka ate it? What if it got put in the oven at the diner and Cesar burned it to a crisp?”

“That probably didn’t happen, Mom…”

“What if--what if it was lost in the accident?”

“I don’t know, Mom.” Rory’s eyes are almost as pain-filled as her mother’s. 

I want to leave, to be anywhere but where I am, witnessing this raw grief that I cannot ease, that I feel somehow tangled up in without knowing why.

“Lorelai?” A kind voice calls hesitatingly from the doorway.

“In here, Sookie,” Rory answers.

Sookie brushes past me and kneels on the floor beside Rory and her mother—Lorelai. Lorelai. The name sounds like free-floating music. It fits her. Or it did, sometime before today. I see a quick flash of something—a memory?—of Lorelai, trying to get her footing as she prepares to skate on an ice-rink in the yard. A man in a blue baseball cap and olive-green army jacket catches her before she falls and they laugh. Her blue eyes sparkle.

Just a flash, and then it is gone.

Sookie is speaking in a soft, clucking tone to Lorelai. “Come on downstairs, honey. You haven’t eaten in three days. I brought cake and frosted cookies and a souffle and about ten casseroles; you have to come down and eat or all that will go to waste.” 

“I can’t eat, Sookie. I don’t think I can ever eat again.” Lorelai’s voice is muffled, coming through the flannel shirt that is pressed to her lips.

“Oh, sure you will! If not today, then tomorrow, right, Rory?”

Rory nods, relief manifesting on her features. “At least come downstairs with us, Mom. You can watch us eat.”

Lorelai sighs and lowers the flannel from her face. She pushes her hair back from her eyes again, and I catch my breath. I feel as though I have seen that gesture a thousand times, even though I have no conscious memory of it. I want to wrap her in my arms, to kiss her, to comfort her, but I am only a ghost and she can’t see me.

“Okay, I’ll go downstairs,” Lorelai says. 

Rory and Sookie help her to her feet. She pulls the blue flannel shirt around her drooping shoulders and over her pink nightgown, slipping the buttons into the buttonholes absently. I can see that her mind is far away, in another time. 

Maybe out on a home-made ice rink with a man in a blue baseball cap. 

*

It is morning. Lorelai sits up from the couch she spent the night sleeping on, hugging the blue-plaid flannel shirt to her body. Paul Anka, the scruffy dog, is curled up at the end of the couch and flops his tail a couple of times, happy to see her awake. She rests a hand on his head. I remember the words from the night before:

_Mom, you should try to sleep._

_Rory, I can’t spend a night in that room, in that bed, ever again._

_Do you want to sleep in with me?_

_No. No. I just want to be alone, Rory. You go to bed and I’ll sleep on the couch._

_I don’t want to leave you alone, Mom._

_Rory, just give me five minutes of peace!_

Rory tears up. Goes to her room. I am powerless. Rory is grieving, too. Whoever they lost meant a great deal to both of them. Maybe everything to both of them.

I am pulled, by some invisible force, to the living room where Lorelai is resting. I have to be near her. I still don’t know why, but I hope that perhaps she senses my presence and it is comforting in some small way. She doesn’t sleep. She stares off into space for hours, dry eyed. Finally she huffs and lunges off the couch, and begins digging through the cupboards and drawers, wild-eyed and desperate, back and forth through the house like a caged animal. _“Where is it?”_ she murmurs, over and over, growing more and more anxious as the minutes tick by without the emergence of the object of her search. I follow her, up the stairs, down the hall, into the bedroom, then the bathroom, through every room, every nook and cranny of the house, until she gives up and falls back on the couch, exhausted.

I watch her now, as she wakes. She doesn’t really want to be awake. Her dream world is heaven; her waking hours are hell. I feel her pain in my own soul.

Rory emerges from her bedroom. She and Lorelai eye each other uncomfortably. Lorelai clears her throat. “About last night—”

“It’s okay, Mom. We were both upset.”

“I’m really sorry. I don’t mean to shut you out. Last night I—I couldn’t deal with it. Maybe I’ll never be able to deal with it.”

“We’ll work on getting there together, Mom.” Rory tries to smile, but her eyes fill with tears before the smile can reach them. “Luke was my _real_ dad, you know? He was there for everything. Every important moment in my life.”

“I know, kid.” Lorelai’s voice is breaking again. She blinks, hard, and shakes her head, sucking in a deep breath. “ _God_ , I need some coffee.”

Coffee. Coffee. Another vision smacks me in the face: Lorelai in a—coffee shop? Restaurant?—begging the man in the backwards baseball cap for just one cup of coffee.

_Please, Luke, please please please please!_

_How many have you had?_

_None!_

_Plus?_

_Well, five, but yours is better!_

The vision—memory—almost knocks me over. Because I’m not just seeing it as an outside observer; instead, I’m looking through the eyes of the man in the hat, watching Lorelai’s brilliantly blue eyes sparkle with suppressed laughter as she flips her dark hair.

Rory’s voice brings me back. “I’ll make the coffee,” she says, and goes to the kitchen. Lorelai stands shakily. Brushing an errant tear from beneath her left eye, and shuffles after Rory. I follow, compelled again by the inexplicable need to be near her, crushed beneath the weight of what I am beginning to suspect is happening to us. 

Lorelai and Rory sit silently at the table, sipping their coffee. The silence hangs in the air, not sure what to do with itself. I feel instinctively that silence is not a common occurrence here. It is brought here against its will by a sorrow too deep for words. 

Finally Lorelai speaks. “We had a fight that day, you know.” 

Rory’s head jerks up. “No, I didn’t know.” She swallows a gulp of coffee. “Was…was it bad?”

“Really bad.” Lorelai stares into her mug, as if she is trying to hide from a memory too painful to face. “Luke was stressed out because out because Anna was giving him a hard time about April coming for the summer, plus a whole shipment of supplies for the diner had been delayed. I was stressed out because we were overbooked at the inn and Sookie was sick, so none of the food was right, and—it wasn’t anything, really; he snapped at me and I snapped at him and before I knew it we were yelling at each other, and he stormed out of the house, and…”

She stops talking, her voice too choked with emotion to continue. Rory is silently weeping, because she knows how the story ends. “…And he drove off, and that was when his truck crashed,” she finishes.

Lorelai nods, her hands pressed together to stop the shaking. “And—and he didn’t have his hat at the hospital, and I couldn’t remember if he was wearing it when he left—but he _had_ to have, because he wore it every day—and that last day at the hospital, when we knew he…wouldn’t wake up, I sent Sookie to look for it at the house, and sent Jackson to the crash site, because I thought maybe something so familiar would help, and…it was just gone. He’s gone. He’s _gone!_ ” The panic is rising in Lorelai’s voice again, and she jumps to her feet, tearing into one of the kitchen cupboards and frantically pulling contents out onto the floor.

“Mom, stop! Stop!” Rory sucks in a breath and skids across the floor, grabbing Lorelai and pulling her away from the cupboard. “It isn’t in there; we’ve pulled everything out eight separate times. But we’ll find it. We _will_.” 

Paul Anka meanders into the kitchen, collapsing beside Lorelai and resting his head in her lap. Another startlingly clear memory surfaces in my mind: a sick dog curled up on a bed, and Lorelai similarly curled in a chair by the bed, keeping watch over him all night. Lorelai cries, worried for her dog and for her estranged daughter, and the man—Luke—minus his blue hat, quietly enters the room and sinks down on the floor beside the chair. He runs his fingers gently through her dark hair and murmurs comforting words until she stops crying and smiles a little. I watch the memory from a distance at first, and then suddenly I am seeing it again through Luke’s eyes. I am stroking her silky hair; I am whispering comforting words in her ear, I am there. _I am Luke_. Lorelai is grieving for _me_. 

And it all comes flooding back. Every moment, since the first time I saw her in Luke’s Diner, the horoscope I carried in my wallet for eight years, loving her with every breath in my body for almost that long, both of us flitting from person to person until at last we collided on the porch steps of the Dragonfly Inn and life was never the same. The affectionate bickering, the spectacular nights, the quiet evenings, our wedding under the chuppa, Rory and April visiting on vacations…and that fight. That last fight where I drove off angry, without saying goodbye; and somehow or other ended up here: a lonely, helpless ghost, watching Lorelai fade away to a shadow and powerless to do anything about it.

I see her, huddled again on the floor with her daughter and her dog, and weight of my own grief nearly crushing me. This is hell. Pure hell. _Why am I here? What am I to do? Am I condemned to this existence eternally?_

Unable to bear the sight of Lorelai’s pain any longer, I look down at my ghostly hands. I nearly stumble back in shock, and all at once I know why I am here.

Clutched in my hands is a worn blue baseball cap.

My second chance.

I drag myself away from the kitchen, away from Lorelai, even though it feels like every force in the universe is trying to keep me there. I have to find a way to get the hat to her. The utter confusion and helplessness of the last 24 hours has been so paralyzing, I never stopped to think about whether or not I could leave her any kind of message.

The need to communicate with her consumes me now. But I can’t do anything yet. I’ll wait until tonight, when she is asleep. I’ll find something, I’ll find a way.

The day drifts by at an agonizingly slow pace. Lorelai alternates between crying and staring off into space. Rory follows her mother around, carrying a stack of books with her. She reads to distract from her grief. I know. I know Rory. I’ve always considered her a little bit mine.

They order Chinese food for dinner, but they barely touch it. Lorelai pushes pork fried rice around on her plate without ever taking a bite. They sit down on the couch to watch The Donna Reed Show, but they don’t make up their own dialogue this time. They are quiet, each lost in their own sadness. 

Finally Rory switches the TV off. “We should go to bed,” she says to Lorelai.

Lorelai nods absently. She’s still wearing the flannel shirt. _My_ flannel shirt. She lifts the collar to her face and inhales deeply. “It still smells like him,” she whispers.

_Lorelai, I am here! Can you see me? Can you feel me? I am here. I will never leave. I will never think about leaving._

Lorelai sighs. “I’m going to try sleeping upstairs tonight.” 

“Okay, Mom. Come down to my room if you need to.” Lorelai stands and Rory wraps her arms around her. “We’ll get through this.”

“I don’t know how.” Lorelai’s voice cracks on the last word and I feel like I am dying all over again.

Rory nods and embraces her mother one more time. She goes to her room off the kitchen and shuts the door. Lorelai climbs the stairs tiredly, Paul Anka following her with quiet, padding steps. 

I follow, too. I see her settle into bed, clinging to the pillow that was mine. She’s too exhausted to cry anymore. Ten minutes go by, and she gets up, shuffling to the CD player, pressing the Play button.

_Now that I’ve worn out, I’ve worn out the world…_

She sways silently, lost in the memory of our wedding dance. Our song. Always our song.

The music ends, and instead of starting it over again, she turns off the CD player and gets back into bed. I hear her whispering into the pillow, _“I will always love you.”_

She sleeps. I pull myself away and go downstairs. I know what message I need to leave.

I quietly search through the kitchen drawers, trying to find a marker, or a pen. _My God, don’t they keep anything useful in this house?_ But of course they don’t. I know this. I know them. Lorelai and Rory.

At last I find a sharpie marker sticking out from under the edge of the fridge. It’s almost dried out, but I am determined to make it work. I lay the hat I’ve been clutching all this time on the kitchen table, and on the white inner lining, I scratch out a message. I put the marker away in a drawer. _So I can still be of some use, apparently,_ I think wryly to myself. 

Back up the stairs, skipping over the creaky one. In through Lorelai’s bedroom door. I place the hat carefully on the pillow she is hugging to her body. She is a beautiful tangle of long brown hair, flannel, and bedsheets. I sit carefully on the edge of the bed, hoping my invisible presence doesn’t wake her. One last time, I brush my hand over her warm satin cheek; I touch the wavy silk of her hair. One last time. I sense that the time is short, that I have nearly completed my mission.

I retreat to the corner of the room, waiting. Waiting for morning.

*

Lorelai gasps. The blood drains from her face. She rockets up in the bed like a jack-in-the-box. “Rory! _Rory!!_ ” she shrieks. 

Rory pounds up the stairs and stumbles into the room, terror on her face. “Mom! What is it? What is it?”

 _“Look.”_ Lorelai can barely get the word out. She points to the blue hat on the pillow. 

“Oh my God,” Rory whispers. “Oh my _God_. How?” 

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” Lorelai is dazed, staring at the hat. She is afraid to touch it. She doesn’t believe it’s real. “So I’m not imagining it, then.”

“No. No, you are not.” Rory clutches her arms across her chest, shivering for a moment. “How could it have gotten there?”

“I—I—” Lorelai reaches out with tentative fingers. Touches the brim of the hat reverently. “It’s real,” she sighs. “It’s real.” She takes it in her hands, turning it over, and gasps. Bursts into heaving sobs. 

“Mom? What—” 

She jumps out of bed, tearing down the stairs and out the front door, into the yard. She crushes the hat to her chest and lifts her tear-stained face to the sky. “Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she murmurs over and over. 

Rory bursts out the front door, down over the steps, to Lorelai’s side. She doubles over, her hands on her thighs, gasping for breath. “Mom, _what is it?_ ”

Lorelai takes a shaky breath and passes the hat to Rory, who looks inside the brim and reads the words scratched on the lining in half-dried marker: _And I will always love you. -L_

Rory smiles through falling tears, and Lorelai smiles back. She takes the hat back the hugs it to her chest once again. “We’ll be all right, Rory. We’ll be all right. He’s here with us.”

_Always, Lorelai. Always._

There is light all around, and I’m not in the house or the yard anymore. I’m looking down on them from somewhere, somewhere that is all reflecting light and peace and unending love, like the way I will always love Lorelai and Rory. I haven’t left. I will never leave. I am watching over them, always.

They will always be a little bit mine.


End file.
